Farley Mowat, author of some of the best young adult adventure novels ever written, passed away last week. He was 92. Most people who offered kind words on his behalf to the Canadian and international media said he left a permanent mark on this country’s cultural landscape. I totally agree: Mowat is an inukshuk on that landscape. As a boy, I devoured his classics Two Against the North and the sequel Curse of the Viking Grave. In 1987, a couple of decades later, during rare off-days from my summer job of loading and unloading airplanes on Baffin Island, I hiked the Baffin tundra. Each time, the gut-level feeling of sheer drama and splendour that Mowat wove into his arctic novels flooded back. Every time I headed into the hills beyond Iqaluit (back then it was called Frobisher Bay) I felt the same way I did as a boy when I cracked Two Against the North: pure gumption and excitement. I yearn today for that feeling, and obtain a semblance of it when I venture into Ontario’s wild places. My memories of Mowat’s books, and an actual copy of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, a gift from my mother, were my literary accompaniment on those hikes. It was an amazing summer.

One of Farley Mowat’s best novels. The mere sight of this cover brings back the excitement I got was a boy from reading it. Highly recommended, even for adults who have never experienced Canada’s north.

Farley Mowat lived in Port Hope, a nice little town on the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario. Port Hope is and has been since the 1930s a major uranium processing centre. Back in the 1930s, uranium was valuable only because it co-occurs with radium. Radium was, until uranium fission reactors began making cheaper substitutes, the world’s only source of useful gamma radiation to fight cancer. It was the first “medical isotope.” (There are actually 25 known isotopes of radium, which occurs naturally in the environment. Radium-226 and -228, daughter products in the uranium-238 and thorium-232 series, respectively, are the longest-lived. Others have shorter half-lives, Ra-223 and -224 for example. The latter two were in the spring of 2001 creatively used along with Ra-226 and -228 to measure inflow and mixing characteristics of water in freshwater lakes; see article.)

I say this because Farley Mowat was anti-nuclear. He was against nuclear weapons, and by extension nuclear power. I suppose that would pit him and me as ideological opponents. But that is not right. I admired the hell out of the guy. Before he became a professional writer, he was a soldier: he joined the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in 1940, at age nineteen, a year into the Second World War. He was in the conflict for the duration. He saw things that affected him deeply. As he told an interviewer in 1995, his experience in the war “stripped away the scales and gave me a clarity I might never have had. The raw reality of what my own species was like and could do was a black revelation.”

In the special case of nuclear power, the technology for the weapon was conflated early on with the technology to make electricity. Both involve fission of uranium and plutonium. But that is where the similarity ends.

However, for those who opposed weapons, it was easy to also oppose energy: weapons had come first, and energy followed hard upon. The technology to make electricity came out of the U.S. navy’s nuclear propulsion program in the early years of the Cold War. To the early anti-nukes, it was all about opposing the U.S. military. I suspect it was that way for Farley Mowat too. (Rick Maltese, on his great blog Deregulate the Atom, has published a guest post of an excellent history of the anti-nuclear movement, which includes good detail on the early groups organized to oppose nuclear weapons. Thanks to the prolific and brilliant Rod Adams for linking to it. Lawrence Wittner’s The Struggle Against the Bomb is also excellent and very well researched.)

The chemical phenomenon of rapid oxidation, i.e. reaction of materials in combination with the oxygen in air, is, in contrast to the physical phenomenon of atomic fission, far more familiar to people. Perhaps this is why people appear willing to live with the often horrible effects of engineered systems that employ rapid oxidation. Chemical explosives employ rapid oxidation. And chemical explosives, including the gunpowder in firearm ammunition, killed the vast majority of people in the Second World War—many, many times more than the atomic strikes on Japan. The overwhelming majority of the people killed in all the wars currently going on in the world right this minute are killed with conventional weapons—that is, weapons that get their power from rapid oxidation.

It is a quirk of human nature that the same people who abhor war, and oppose nuclear power because they think its historical connection with nuclear weapons equates to a technological connection, have no problem getting into a car and driving somewhere—even though the chemical reactions of rapid oxidation that propel bullets toward human targets are very similar to those that propel cars toward destinations. Bullets speeding toward human targets is bad. Cars speeding to destinations can be dangerous, but they are usually not. And they are not morally bad.

Well, uranium fission is just a far more efficient analog of combustion. For those of us who care about the environment, that is a critically important fact. It is better to use a fuel that requires 93 times less infrastructure. That means it has a far, far lighter impact on the planet.

Farley Mowat saw nuclear energy as analogous to nuclear weapons. He was wrong about that. That does not make him any less of a great and noble human being. I will miss him.

1 comment for “RIP Farley Mowat: an affectionate farewell to an opponent of the softest-stepping energy technology mankind ever devised”

James Greenidge

May 15, 2014 at 17:11

Re: “Farley Mowat saw nuclear energy as analogous to nuclear weapons. He was wrong about that. That does not make him any less of a great and noble human being.”

That might be so, but then it behooves nuclear advocates and industry and the fight against GW to show and define the error of his anti-nuclear ways to his fans and any party whom might read his views with unquestioning esteem and in this issue be regarded as an ideological martyr to the anti-nuclear cause.

Table A1: Total Ontario generation and related CO2, by fuel, in the hour preceding 23:06 on 2018-02-21

FUEL

MWh

CO2, tons

Nuclear

10,265

0

Hydro

4,844

0

Gas

552

223

Wind

507

0

Biofuel

27

27

Oil & Gas

0

0

Solar

0

0

TOTAL

16,195

250

CO2 intensity per kWh (CIPK) in the last hour: 15.49 grams.

Table A2: Total Ontario generation and related CO2, by fuel, on 2018-02-21

FUEL

MWh

CO2, tons

Nuclear

235,222

0

Hydro

101,516

0

Gas

24,828

9,797

Wind

23,030

0

Biofuel

537

537

Oil & Gas

0

0

Solar

4,061

0

TOTAL

385,542

10,334

Average CO2 intensity per kWh (CIPK) over period: 25.97 grams

This content is updated at 50 minutes past the hour. Refresh at that time to see latest available data. Sources: www.ieso.ca and EmissionTrak™

Table A3 Should we replace nuclear plants with natural gas-fired ones? This table compares actual Ontario grid CO2 emissions from the last hour with those from a grid in which gas has replaced nuclear.

Actual Ontario grid

Gas replaces nuclear

250

5,896

15.49

365.31

Tons CO2CIPK, grams
If gas had replaced nuclear last hour, Ontario power plants would have dumped enough CO2 to fill Rogers Centre 2.0 times. As it was, 250 tons were dumped, which would fill Rogers Centre 0.1 times.